Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (26 page)

“Don’t you bother worrying about
that
. And don’t you flatter yourself, either. Your heart still ticks regular as good clockwork. It was never your life I wanted, dear.”

“Then what... what
have
you stolen?” the guest croaks, the zealot, this lottery prize spread out on folds of fine Irish linen the color of frost. “What
have
you taken?”

The nameless woman stops fussing with Tess Brockett’s hair and makes a greater show of looking offended than is strictly necessary. “Why, nothing,” she replies. “I have taken nothing at all from you. In point of fact, I have gone to some conspicuous lengths
to give
you something for your troubles. Recompense, you might say, remuneration for your time, which I well know is valuable.” And there is another moment or two or three as the nameless woman’s words lie bitter upon the mind of Tess Brockett, a few heartbeats before she finally permits her eyes to stray from the creature’s derisive face and glances down at her own naked body and what has been made of it. The elaborate tapestry she has become, her skin tattooed with glyphs from the darkest arts of ancient races, with incantations written in Mycenaean Greek and various other Proto-Hellenic languages, power and spite bound in at least a score of forgotten or rarely uttered tongues. Indeed, it seems that hardly an inch of her has been spared, and in many places the tattooed characters have somehow been layered one upon another with such exquisite skill that there has been no blurring together or loss of any of their crucial definition.

“It’s what you came for, is it not? the nameless woman asks, wondering now if Tess Brockett will scream, or if, perhaps, the sight of herself transformed and permanently scarred with these blasphemies has so undone her sanity that she will never scream again. “The unexpurgated text of
De Vermiis Mysteriis,
if not the book itself, which I have kept safe for so many long lives of man,” and then she reads aloud a passage worked into the skin just below Tess’ navel—“
Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigilim
.” The words drip poisonously from her claret tongue, as though the organ were fashioned to that end alone, and now there is another sound from the sky, and one may fancy that vast and leathery wings have begun to beat at the sulphurous, furnace-stained clouds.

“That has always seemed to my ears such poetry,” the nameless woman says, when the beating of those wings has faded away to no more than loathsome echoes. “One marvels at the reverence of its author, to have worked so hard at the cadences, when a cruder syntax would no doubt have sufficed. Old Tsathoggua and his ilk have never struck me as the sort of deities to have such pretty sentiments lavished upon them. But, then, maybe the subtleties of their glory are lost on me.” She lays a hand on Tess Brockett’s belly, hiding away the passage she has just spoken, and several others, as well.

Her guest’s thin lips are trembling almost uncontrollably now, and only by a tremendous dint of will does she retain the lucidity required to speak to the one who has done this unspeakable thing to her, who has marked not only her flesh, but the very roots of her soul.

“Not enough,” she says, “to simply kill me and be done with it,” and this earns another toothsome smile from the nameless, pale woman.

“No, no,
no.
That would have been such a terrible waste of opportunity, don’t you
see)
Which isn’t to say there were not a few deaths involved. The three Chinamen I hired to do the work, for example. I could not very well suffer them to live, not after having each read so much of the grimoire. Not to mention a few of the choicer
Sathlattae
from the fabled
Cthäat Aquadingen,
which I am well enough aware you have also long sought to destroy. You don’t allow ordinary
men
to read and copy, and possibly commit to memory, such precious, potent lines and then send them back out into the world. That would have been careless, and I have been trusted not to be careless with this matter, Miss.”

“Trusted,” Tess Brockett murmurs, and the nameless woman is pleased to hear the rapid fraying of that voice, and knows that those who charged her with this duty will not be disappointed.

“Most certainly,” she says. “Never, I think, have I won any more solemn task than your own transformation. Any common diabolist or would-be necromancer may mumble a few unholy words, can wield such crude instruments as knives or hot brands to kill and maim and unhorse purity. But there’s no art to be found there. No, these undertakings require painstaking consideration, and patience, too, if one is to so entirely corrupt the flesh and...” and she pauses, drawing it out, lending a touch more drama, searching for the least sincere turn of phrase. “... well, one as previously
unsullied
as yourself.”

Tess Brockett’s eves drift from her tattooed flesh, and back to the smiling countenance of the nameless woman.

“I do not dare to ever waste irony, Miss,” she says. “Not irony so perfectly sublime as this,” and now the hand laid upon Tess’ belly moves a few inches nearer the carefully shaved cleft of her sex. Even that secret recess of her body has not been spared this desecration, and the spiraling, meandering patterns of text worked into her by the slain artisans create the impression that her vagina is bleeding maledictions. Though most of the tattoos covering her body have been executed in shades of grey and black, blues and greens, a sanguine assortment of reds have been used between her legs.

“Please,” Tess whispers. “Please don’t.”

“There’s that word again,” the nameless woman says, and she does not withdraw her hand. “I truly think it’s a sort of disappointment, Miss, hearing that word from your lips. I wonder, when you burned that house in Nueva España, you and your merry band of firebugs, when you painted the skies above San Agustín with the glow of that particular funeral pyre, did the women you... what’s the word? purified... beg as
you
beg now?”

Tess Brockett does not take her eyes away from the woman’s hand, which has settled there upon her crotch like some strange white insect. “They were
not
women,” Tess protests, “Really now, were they
not
? Did they not also have hearts and loves and hopes, feelings and souls and desires all of their very own?”

“They were
witches
,” Tess Brockett replies, beginning to shiver at the woman’s icy touch, and perhaps also at the horror of her own fate. “They were not—”

“—spreading their legs for the right gods?” the nameless woman asks, interrupting her.

Tess struggles to find the requisite volition to shut her eyes, so no matter what she has to feel, what she has to hear, or know is true, at least she’ll not have to see what has been done, what is still
being
done as the creature begins massaging the button of her clit with one cold index finger. But it’s not there to find, that volition. It’s been stripped away along with everything else, that strength, and so she watches.

“’Witches,” she says again. “The concubines of demons, a den of murderesses, tribades...”

“Trihades,” the nameless woman sighs, the word leaking from ashen lips, those two syllables almost as boreal as her touch. “Does that get you wet, Miss, thinking on the pleasures they took from one another, needing the cock of no man to find ecstasy?” The nameless woman’s eyes glint iridescent hues of crimson and gold in the candlelight as she speaks. “Tell me plain, Tess, why is it you have never married, being the virtuous, proper woman you are? Why is there no
Mister
for thee, Miss?”

Tess grits her teeth together that they will not begin to chatter and click as the stinging chill spreading out from the nameless woman’s fingers works its way through muscle, bone, and sinew.

“Just never had the time to settle yourself down, I suppose,” the nameless woman says, and she smiles (flashing those teeth again) and slips a finger over the moistened folds of Tess’ tattooed labia. “Seems to me, though, an institution sacred as the holy union twixt a man and a woman, seems to
me,
Miss, even our saintly latter-day Jehanne d’Arc should not be deprived of so hallowed an honor. Or has the right man not come along? Could be, you drove a stake in his chest, or sent him off to rot in some Union or English prison. Or...” and the finger pauses, momentarily lingering at the fragile folds of Tess Brockett’s maidenhead, “... could it he, the right
man
is no man at all? Maybe, this night, we’ll find out.”

Stiffening, Tess replies, “There
will
come a day of judgment, beast, a day of final reckoning, even for you.” And then she tries to begin reciting a prayer, a desperate petition for intervention and rescue, but she finds it is as though the words written upon her skin have wiped the stanzas of supplication from her memory.

“Will there be, indeed?” the pale and nameless woman asks, and with that, her intruding finger roughly tears and pushes aside the hymen, drawing blood and pain that pales in comparison to the glacial cold filling whatever remains of the woman who was once Tess Brockett. And the nameless woman finds the blood only eases her entry into that long neglected vestibule. “And what, then,
of you:
How will your angry, little god greet its most faithful servant, when it sees the abomination she has allowed herself to be fashioned into? Are you certain there is that much mercy inside your god, that much
compassion
for a poor, broken being whose very existence will now open doorways to insanity and agony and realms of unimaginable chaos?”

“What...?” Tess Brockett begins, then stops, her heart racing, pounding inside its osseous cage of ribs,her breath coming up short now as that finger explores the walls of her sex. “Beast,” she gasps, shuddering, “What... would you
ever
know... of compassion:”

“A fur enough inquiry,” the nameless woman replies, but then, rather than answering the question, leans down and begins lapping at Tess Brockett, an oddly prickling tongue greedily licking away blood from the torn hymen, along with the salty, pungent wine of vaginal fluids—the living elixir of sebum, sweat, cervical mucus, oviductal secretions, the liquors of the Skene’s and Bartholin’s glands, urea and squalene, lactic and acetic acids, pyridine, vinous aldehyde, and the juices leaking directly from the delicate membranes of the vagina. The nameless woman is a gourmand, a glutton, a connoisseur of
all
the flavors of female and male, and her prize’s horror and repulsion at being so dined upon only enhances its already eloquent sapidity.

The nameless woman drinks long, and she drinks deep, and before she is sated, her teeth have drawn more blood than was afforded by a torn hymen, and Tess Brockett lies weeping and moaning, wracked by the violence of orgasms that transcend and negate any simple, human delectation. The air trapped inside the garret is pummeled again and again by her cries,delirious screams wrung so readily from out her dry larynx and her vocal cords that have lain still for so many days. And, too, the atmosphere below that roof brightens and dims, but not by any guttering of the beeswax pillars and tapers. Indescribable colors seep from the tattoos, glimmers of the nethermost extremes of the spectrum and so alien to the eyes of earthly beings, but colors none the less, and, moreover colors that Tess’ transformation has somehow disposed her to perceive. The incantations rise from her skin and twirl and swoop and coil into infinitely complex spirals, and, between her screams, she can hear the chanting of fiendish supplicants borne on interstellar breezes across incalculable gulfs of distance, time, and nonspacial, non temporal dimensions.

In the minutes or hours that follow, as the dizzying heights and depths of Tess’ euphoria, awe, revulsion, and shock gradually diminish to only an incidental roar behind her eyes, the nameless woman sits crouched there between her thighs. They might make a fitting portrait to hang on the wall of some Libertine’s private brothelry, or the altar of those hidden cults that, even in this age of science and machines, worship at the feet of Dionysus or Discordia or kneel before the memory of the monstrous Great Old Ones. Or they might make a thing to be worshipped themselves. The nameless woman kneads creams and unguents into Tess’ tattooed skin, and later, she’ll explain to her prize how this skin must now be cared for, lest the ink begin to fade and the energies bound therein become uncontrollable. She felt that fleeting instant when the zealot fell and the crusader came to understand that she now numbered among the ranks of the
bête noires
she once hunted with such an insatiable fervor and such perfect conviction.

By the slowest of slow degrees, the nameless woman feels Tess Brockett rising up through strata of dream and delirium, her consciousness returning, and as it comes, expanding like a bubble of mephitic gas nearing the surface of a stagnant mere. What wakes is not what fell to sleep, if one can rightly call such a pell-mell, tumbling descent anything as prosaic as sleep. What wakes in the candlelit garret at the edge of the Littleton Row stockyards in Cherry Creek is a
novel
being, one who’s been so exquisitely reforged that only the most general sort of resemblance to its former self remains. What wakes is unfathomable, and broken, and aroused to new purpose. The nameless woman knows that, in time, it will cast aside the name of Tess Brockett to choose another, or, like herself, this new incarnation will realize that it exists now beyond the necessity or appropriateness of human appellations.

What wakes opens eyes gone black as a collier’s fingernails, black as bitumen, and the pale and nameless woman smiles her razor smile and blesses this daughter with a few lines recalled from a book of William Blake. “What the hammer?” she asks. “What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp, dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

It watches the nameless woman for a time before it speaks with this voice could that still could pass for that of Tess Brockett, at least among undiscerning mortal ears or ears untrained to detect atrocity. The nameless woman sees clearly how this makes her triumph all the greater, for certainly it means that many more fools who will not know what has become of their shining knight errant until it is far too late for them to avoid the calamity to be visited upon them.